Göran R Buckhorn writes:
There are two famous institutions in the village of Mystic in Connecticut: Mystic Seaport – The Museum of America and the Sea and The Mystic Aquarium. In the shadow of these larger institutes, just upriver from Mystic, in the tiny village of Old Mystic, is an organisation with the nowadays non-PC name of the Indian & Colonial Research Center (ICRC) – if there are any members of the ‘PCP’ (‘Politically Correct Police’) who take offensive, they seem not mind the names of the two federal agencies in Washington, D.C., the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Bureau of Indian Education.
The ICRC has a fantastic collection of manuscripts, early maps, data of Native American culture and artifacts, family genealogies and coats of arms (!) and 19th- and 20th-century photographs. The collection is held in an old red brick building, which used to be the 1856 Mystic Bank, in Main Street in Old Mystic.
The ICRC was founded in 1965 to honour the work of Eva Lutz Butler, who was a local historian, archaeologist and anthropologist. She made notes of the local history and collected photographs which are now held by the ICRC.
To increase the awareness of the ICRC, a group of volunteers working for the organisation has mounted a photography exhibition at the Ames Room in the Mystic & Noank Library in Mystic. The photographs in the exhibition, called “Commonalities”, are mostly from the 1800s and show people, places and things in the Mystic and New London areas.
When I visited the exhibition the other day, I was surprised to find a photograph that any HTBS reader would be interested in, I think, a picture from the Yale-Harvard Regatta on the Thames River in New London. Unfortunately, the photograph is undated.
The exhibition “Commonalities” at the Mystic & Noank Library in Library Street in Mystic will run until 31 October 2015.
More information about the ICRC can be found on the organisation’s website.
